


eighteen

by velleitees



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Flashbacks, Fluff, M/M, Marriage Proposal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-30
Updated: 2018-07-30
Packaged: 2019-06-18 18:55:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15492483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/velleitees/pseuds/velleitees
Summary: twenty-seven, thirty-one. there are many things phil's unsure about but he's sure about this.





	eighteen

**Author's Note:**

> a repost, though slightly edited and i still stand by the fact that this a mess. but still, i needed to get this out.

Phil wakes at nine a.m. to light breathing. A man, twenty-seven, sleeps beside him — still more like a boy than a man and sometimes more a man than a boy, hair colored estival by curious sunlight. It’s haloed around his head, curled unlike when they first met. Phil, thirty-one, woke to light breathing from a sleepless night among the other sleepless nights. He's thirty-one, yes, and the man beside him is newly twenty-seven, and when they first met through the fuzzy webcam he was just a boy, just eighteen,  _just_ eighteen. Just,  _just_. And the man beside him, sometimes a boy, blinks at him, his eyelashes fluttering at the midday sunlight spilling all over them. He smiles, and Phil, thirty-one, too far from youth, is moonstruck. His feelings are full of westerlies. His heart, like all those years ago fails, flutters, falls, crashes like the ocean and he's  _drowning_. And Dan Howell, twenty-seven, watches as his feelings drip over the bedsheets, bleeding him dry, fingertips on the curves of his face. Love coats his tongue and chokes the words from Phil's throat, and it's fine — it's  _fine_ , because in the drawer of the bedside table, underneath the birthday cards and receipts, there's a box.

"Good morning," Phil, heart beating in disarray, mutters. Dan, unknowing, says it back, smiling like he did when Phil was twenty-one.

 

(Go back and—

"I came of age."

“You came of age three years ago."

“Yeah, but I’m technically of age _now_. Right here, with all the alcohol and shit.”

A symphony of slot machines, glasses clinking, and cards being dealt make up the soundtrack of the casino. Dan stares at him, expectant, maybe. Phil clears his throat, heat stinging his cheeks for some reason, possibly at Dan’s tone, anxious and implying. Like all those years back on the glassy gondola overlooking a city huffing memories waiting to be made.

Phil tightens his hold on the tumbler. "Is there something—"

"A kiss."

They're in Las Vegas where pinks are crude and neon purples are anything but insipid, where puddles drip in plastic blues like the city has stolen away at every color and splashed it here. And the virulent reds —  _the straw_ — it almost looks to be the same shade as Dan's lips or his cheeks or his drink. The laugh that follows Dan’s request is pitched and uneasy. Phil averts his gaze to the raspberry liquid.  

"I was just joking," Dan looks at Phil, swallowing, and then his eyes are on the floor. All the remaining bravado visibly dissolves.

When Phil eventually glances back up Dan’s looking at him, face all lovely and flushed, but slightly hurt, and Phil opens his mouth only to snap it shut. _Later_ , Phil wants to promise, but “It’s fine,” is what he says instead.

It would be so easy, so  _reckless_  to pull Dan close and kiss him like he asked, touch him like he wants to be touched — but he can’t. Not here, not now, not with a world of possibilities they were so close to grasping. Though it _was_ fine, of course. Fine until Phil started drinking, fine until Dan threw down shots where one became two and two became five. Fine until the elevator ride up to their room as he failed miserably to keep his foul, foul mind off their proximity because the way Dan is touching him all over is most definitely his undoing.

And feet stumbling, body pressed to his own; Phil, twenty-five, Dan, twenty-one— _I came of age_ — they kiss.)

 

Fingertips touch Dan's face and Phil, thirty-one, traces his cheek, his brow, his lips, even daring to dip to his neck because Dan avoids a whimper and Phil is still somewhat scared and in love and utterly, utterly  _gone_. Gone in a sense where he's here, but not really. Lost in a world with just a bed with his body and Dan's and everything else is white noise. Where the chaos of his feelings are mostly settled, other times loud, where all that's left is comfort and home and quiet. But Dan Howell's a vision, Phil thinks, whether at his best or at his worst, a sheer vision. And maybe Phil holds onto him too tight or Dan presses on his knuckles like the bones beneath his skin are important, and maybe he tries not to think about the rings and maybe he tries not to think about how he'll ask, or how Dan, drunk, twenty-four, had said,  _I want to marry you_. Or how Phil, twenty-eight, equally as inebriated had replied with  _when you're twenty-eight._ And Dan, now just a year short of twenty-eight, catches Phil's wrist, eyes still sleepy, phone stirring, and stirring, and stirring, delirious enough without a scathing remark slipping from the crack between his lips, puts his fingers in his mouth.

A sharp inhale  **—** and all at once Phil’s lungs, his throat, his chest, they fill with words that suffocate.

 _(Lovestruck_  is the first he can recall amidst the flood of nouns, adjectives, verbs. _Degree in English Language and Linguistics_. It's funny how easily the English language fails him, words thrown casually in the wind, never making sense. But love is made of breathy sighs, figuratively; so is inexorable — literally as he says it aloud. _Love, love, love_. Says it in ribs and hips and skin and collarbones, breathing it out until he’s no longer breathing anymore.)

They've been close for however many years but Dan still manages to render him speechless, makes him forget his perfect presents, his simple clauses. How even at twenty-two and graduating, his degree had already been made useless. Dan cheeks colour all of a sudden, as red as the shirt Phil likes to wear, and he knows he's staring but words don't leave his mouth because they can’t. Because the semantics of the english language simply fails to convey enough of what love means.

 

Seven years back, they moved in together; twenty, twenty-four. Dan carves himself into Phil's chest, figuratively, literally, and it  _aches._  Inescapable. Irrevocable. He tries very hard to ignore it, the way his smell gets everywhere, the casual touches, their bodies pressed in a way that's a privilege for intimacy — invites it, even. But he shouldn't, they couldn't. 

 _Never, never, never_ —

(But they do, of course. They act on their feelings and ride on infinity because they’re young and reckless and have already been through what seems like a lifetime’s worth of choices and hardships. Because you see, the heart is a fickle thing like the mind is. It’s undeniably selfish. But Phil would know later that nothing else could measure to what he has here and now, and the person he has beside him through all this.

Because here, Phil Lester follows his heart.

And here, he never looks back.)

 

Shadows contour the edges of Dan Howell's face and he's severely beautiful, twenty-seven barely showing in his features. He’s somewhat older but young and somewhat young but older, and Phil holds onto him, wanting to protect his hands, his body. Dan doesn't need protecting, though, but the thought remains. It’s intrinsic, rather, engraved in the deepest parts of his soul even though Dan doesn’t believe it. His phone stirs and stirs and stirs. It's difficult to look away. He chokes on his syllables while fingers trace up and down his arm, their bodies all sorts of close, breath ghosting across his face, and he can tell Dan’s still sleepy and hazed from release from the night before. Phil, thirty-one, mutters,  _you're twenty-seven_ , and Dan, slightly more awake, rolls his eyes, scoffing, seemingly aware of the rings under Phil’s eyes but not the rings in a velvet box hidden just a foot away. 

 _“_ Marry me _,"_ Phil says. Three syllables, vowels and consonants laid out before them. Expresses a request, a want, a desire, a  _need_. Phil should say more, he should.

At twenty-seven years old, Dan Howell's vocabulary is flawless, borderline pretentious, presumptuous, endearing, and very, very dirty. But the reply Phil acquires is austere, monosyllabic, lacking uncertainty unlike the future, where all that resides is possibilities and hypotheticals, an affirmation:  _“_ _Yes_.”

And Phil, thirty-one, a patient involved with an incurable sickness (— _lovesick_ ) looks at Dan, twenty-seven, with worshipping eyes, hands shaky as they slip a silver band on his finger and whispers, “Forever, huh?”

 

Go back and—

Dan's eighteen.  _Eighteen_. Barely legal though not in some places, permitted to drink alcohol, own land, get tattooed. He's eighteen, and Phil's twenty-two, both somewhat still boys, youth unvarnished in ways that are entirely volatile, entirely reckless.

Dan's eighteen and Phil sees him on the platform, sticking out with his awkward bones and pretty looks, painfully clear without the fuzz of poorly lit backgrounds. He walks over, nervous but mostly enthralled — and the words, the actions, they come all at once and never stop.

 

(Nine years, a third of a life, two-thousand and nine, two-thousand and eighteen) (a history before Dan Howell and a history after).

**Author's Note:**

> watch me yell on tumblr in the tags i'm [velleitees](https://velleitees.tumblr.com/) on tumblr :)


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